


Appetite for Destruction

by EllaStorm



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Abuse, Drug Withdrawal, Hurt Q, M/M, Psychological Torture, Torture, and it's not exactly my fault for once, okay kids this is dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 14:18:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14695956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllaStorm/pseuds/EllaStorm
Summary: Being the boyfriend of a double-O is a dangerous thing. Q learns that the hard way, in a cold, dark place between concrete walls, wires and syringes.





	Appetite for Destruction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandraMorningstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandraMorningstar/gifts).



> This story is a birthday gift to my wonderful, wonderful friend @SandraMorningstar. Her prompt was straightforward enough: Q gets captured and tortured, Bond gets him out. Since she left me absolute freedom with how I was going to go about the whole thing, you can blame all the terrible stuff on my very own twisted mind (seriously, read the tags!).
> 
> @Sandra, my love, a very happy birthday to you – and I really hope this is what you saw in your mind’s eye for this story. Thank you, truly, for your friendship during all these years – may there be many more <3
> 
> (The title is shamelessly ripped from the first Guns’n’Roses album – a.k.a. the band to listen to, if you really want to get in the mood for writing about drugs and physical violence… I mean this in the most favourable way possible. They really helped me.)

The air tasted like old sawdust, stale, dry and chafing in his throat, and Q couldn’t move his hands.

He couldn’t remember how he’d come here, either, couldn’t remember anything of the last few – hours? weeks? God, how long had he been here? Not knowing alarmed him more right now than the rigid makeshift cuffs that were holding him to a surface before him – a table perhaps –, or the fact that someone blinded him with a bright light straight to his face, which sparked a stinging pain behind his reflexively pressed-shut eyelids.

“You’re awake. Good.” It was a male voice that Q had never heard before in his life, with a Spanish or Latin American accent as far as he could tell from the few words. He forced himself to blink against the brightness and look at the dark silhouette behind the lamp, while his mind slowly rebooted, piecing information together.

He had been at Bond’s. There had been wine and dinner and Bond had wanted him to stay overnight, but Q had insisted on going home and feeding his cats; and then Bond had offered to at least drive him, but Q had laughed and reminded him – for the hundredth time – that his flat was not even a ten-minute-walk away and that he was capable of looking out for himself, thank you very much. A cold lump formed in his stomach, when he realised that the last thing he remembered of that evening was his walk home, a sudden dizziness and the rain-drenched street swaying perilously before his eyes. _Someone must have followed me. Someone must have followed me and knocked me out with chemicals and taken me here._

Fear was spreading through his veins, cold and paralysing, while Q’s brain rattled through the facts: If an MI6-employee was kidnapped, it was usually no coincidence, meaning it was doubtful that these people were but mere criminals. Mafia, terrorists, something of that sort was far more likely. From statistics Q also knew that kidnappings by people like this, no matter how successful in the bigger scheme, tended to have an unfavourable outcome for the kidnappee. And as far as training for interrogation went-

A hand collided with his cheek, rather brutally, and Q gasped.

“I asked you a question, boy.”

Q breathed through the ringing in his ears. He had been so completely lost in thought that he hadn’t even heard the question. Luckily, the man repeated it.

“We know you’re MI6. What is your position?”

“I…” Q’s voice was cracking, like he hadn’t used it in too long – which was probably the case. But the lie slipped easily enough over his lips; and he didn’t have to fake the frightened delivery at all. “I’m…I’m only a secretary. What-?”

Another hit, this time the backhand, knuckles making harsh contact with Q’s other cheek, efficiently shutting him up.

“A secretary?” The lamplight was taken out of his eyes, and Q could finally see something. He had been shackled palms-up to the surface of an old table scarred by cuts and bumps, with a pair of makeshift metal cuffs that had been screwed onto it, a permanent installation speaking of frequent use. The room around him had little more to offer in terms of furnishing, if one didn’t take the abundance of bare concrete walls into account. There were no windows – the only momentary source of light was the green desk lamp the man sitting opposite Q had held in his face. He was now angling it back into the room towards a stocky, bald man with bulks of muscles for arms beside him, who had remained silent so far. In any other circumstances Q might have regarded the one sitting down as very good looking, with his curled black hair, olive skin tone and sharp, elegant features, dressed in a deep-blue, tailored suit. The only thing that put him off was the calm, calculated brutality in the man’s eyes as he waited for his companion to answer.

“We know from our source that he occupies a higher position in MI6, Mr. Cézar, Sir.”

Q swallowed hard. They had a source. This was a lot worse than he had initially thought.

Cézar’s eyes fell back on him, dark, pitiless pools of coldness.

“Are you lying?”

“I’m a secretary,” Q insisted. He had the bad feeling that he would repeat this mantra many, many more times in the next few hours. Though Q had never been in the field, he had worked there with electronic eyes and ears too many times not to know what was expecting him. Kidnapping, in their business, meant somebody trying to get information. If necessary, through torture. And torture could mean a whole lot of different things, a few of which Q was already familiar with through his work, even though he’d rather not be. He wondered, for a moment, how Bond had coped with these types of situations in the past – he had been taken prisoner a few times, and he had been tortured, too. Was there a strategy? Meditation? Or merely the steely resolve of a double-O? Q wished, for one desperate second, that he had taken the time to ask him about this and learned something. Or, better yet, that right now he could _be_ 007, with his attitudes and his experience and his slap-in-the-face ironic façade that seemed to get him through everything and anything, instead of his very own, browbeaten self.

None of these things was a viable option.

“We’ll see about that, Mr _Secretary,_ ” Cézar retorted, dripping sarcasm in his voice _._ “But let’s start with something else, shall we? Tell me about Mr Bond. And I would advise you not to lie. We know of your- involvement with him.”

After the fact that this Cézar had knowledge of his work in MI6, the question didn’t really come as a surprise to Q. They’d headed him off right after leaving Bond’s apartment. It wasn’t exactly a hard guess who in MI6 they’d want information about from him.

Q thought about lying, but he was afraid that, once he did lie, he’d either start spewing information that he couldn’t control; or that Cézar would catch on very quickly. This was not a man that could be deceived. At least not by someone like Q. _It would take a double-O for that. It would take James Bond._

For want of a better strategy, Q opted for silence.

Cézar sighed.

“Alright. Cook one up, Gustavo.”

The bald man turned on his heel and left through a massive, nondescript steel door at the end of the room; a door that could be found in any place, really, from an abandoned industrial compound to a military area, to an old WWII-basement under a private house, to... _No one will find me,_ Q thought, and his guts twisted into one single cold knot, when Cézar rose from his chair and rounded the table. _No one._

The sleeve of Q’s jumper was being rolled up almost gently, as if Cézar actually cared about the state of the fabric.

“I really hoped I wouldn’t have to do this.” His voice sounded regretful. “But in a way it’s also a good thing, you being uncooperative, you know. Where does one get un-biased testers these days?”

He pulled a blue elastic band from the pocket of his suit-jacket, one of those used in hospitals for staunching veins when taking blood samples, and put it on Q’s upper arm, then went in search for an appropriate vessel. Q himself was getting increasingly confused and panicked. It was clear they were going to inject him with something – the question was only: What? And what would it do to him?

“Ah, this should be a good one. Don’t worry. It will feel fantastic. Promise. We have a lot of satisfied customers all over the world that will confirm it.”

That excluded a bunch of substances; and left one very uncomfortable, obvious conclusion, that the bulky man, Gustavo, promptly confirmed upon entering again only seconds later, a syringe filled with a muddy, brown liquid in hand.

“Thank you, Gustavo. Would you be so kind and – restrain our customer. He seems not at all too keen on this honour.”  
Indeed, Q had started thrashing around on his chair, actively struggling against the cuffs, but it was no use: Chair and table were both bolted to the floor, and Gustavo’s fleshy hand gripped his head, bending it backwards, while his arm pressed Q’s upper body into the back of the chair.

Cézar hummed a tune while he pushed a drop of the substance out through the needle, testing the flow and making sure there were no air bubbles left. Q recognised it as a Velvet Underground song.

 _What an irony,_ he thought bitterly, when he felt the small prick of the needle in his arm.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then his whole body seemed to relax out of itself and a feeling of complete bliss overtook him in a white and golden wave. He stopped struggling against Gustavo’s hands, slackening in his chair, and Cézar’s laughter drifted through the air. It didn’t bother him, nothing bothered him, not even the words whispered right into his ear seconds later.

“Don’t you feel just like Jesus’ son?”

 

 

_

 

 

When he came to, his head was being held under water, ice cubes bumping his cheeks, and his lungs were burning, aching for air. A rough hand at his neck dragged him out only milliseconds before Q would have given up and breathed in.

“What is your name? What is your position? What can you tell us about James Bond?”

It was Gustavo’s voice, Gustavo’s brutal grip.

Q slowly shook his head, greedily gulping up air, the residue of the opiate shocked out of him by a roaring fear of death.

His head went back in the ice.

 

 

_

 

 

After the drowning came a beating with an electronic wire that left stinging, sizzling wounds all over his back; and then Cézar came in, gave him one more of his faux-pitiful looks, and injected him with another dose of heroin.

 

 

_

 

 

It didn’t take long and Q lost all feeling for the passage of time. Sometimes he was allowed to sleep, sometimes they left a rattling, flickering neon light on that woke him every half hour; sometimes there was food and water, sometimes not. The only constant was the drug they pushed into his body at regular intervals, freeing him from pain for a blissful period of time. His brain – the parts that were still working normally and not solely focusing on survival, anyway – told him that he was building up a tolerance, that they were probably increasing the dosage every time, that he was probably already addicted, but none of that mattered in the precious parts of his days when nothing hurt.

 

 

_

 

 

After a while Q realised that the cruelty they inflicted on him was as elegant and tailored as Cézar’s suits, always meant to make him suffer, but never to mutilate him. The only explanation he had was that they had informed MI6 of his imprisonment and were still hoping to trade him in one piece. Unlike them, Q knew MI6 politics. There were no trade-offs. Especially if the kidnappee might have talked; and everyone who wasn’t a double-O might have talked. Even a Quartermaster could be supplanted. What he was truly scared of was the day Cézar would understand that, too. What he was scared of was what would happen then.

 

 

_

 

 

They stopped giving him the heroin. One day, out of nowhere, Cézar didn’t come, and Q waited, hoped that it would be given to him, still, hoped for that more, he realised with sudden dismay, than he hoped for his freedom. He didn’t receive it; and what followed were the single most horrible hours of his life. _Withdrawal symptoms,_ his brain kept telling him as he wallowed around on the concrete floor in his now-sullied boxer shorts like a wounded animal. But his knowledge of the fact did nothing against the shivers, the roaches crawling under his skin, the cold sweat and racing pulse, the nausea, and the pain, so much _pain._ Every single wound they had inflicted on him seemed to be inflicted all over again, burning, stabbing, aching; and Q screamed, screamed at the top of his lungs, _begged._

He got no answer.

 

 

_

 

 

After an indefinable period of time, impossibly, it got better. The shivers stopped and his heart rate normalised. The pain was still there, worse than ever, but apart from the feeling that he _should_ have another shot, the active _need_ of another shot was slowly subsiding.

A short while after he had made that observation, the neon tube over his head flickered to life; and Cézar entered with Gustavo in tow.

“How are you doing?” Cézar asked, lightly. “You were screaming earlier. I hope I don’t have to worry too much. Withdrawal can be ugly.”

He nodded at Gustavo who pulled Q up by his neck and dragged him towards the wall on the other side of the room. There were shackles there, too, on the wall, that Q had become familiar with during his beatings; and this was where he was put again, facing concrete. Only now something was different: Gustavo’s hands wandered over his back almost lovingly; and then Q’s boxers were pulled down with a cruel rip.

 _No_ , was all he could think. _No, no, no._

They had drowned him, burned him, whipped him and beaten him repeatedly, put him through withdrawal symptoms mere hours ago, but they had never inflicted _this_ particular cruelty on him.

Well, not until now.

“We were speaking to MI6,” Cézar’s soft voice explained from behind Q. “And they were doing the usual thing. Stalling, buying time. And then, just yesterday, when they were put on the spot, and none of the stalling worked any more, they told me that you were telling the truth. That you were actually not important to them. That you were just a secretary. That no one was going to spend money on you.” Cézar made a dramatic pause. “Which leaves me with two possibilities: I could either believe _they_ are lying, to protect themselves; and I am inclined to do so, if _you_ are willing to give me a few pieces of information in turn. You are way too tight-lipped for a secretary, anyway, and I want to believe that you are still of importance to me. You might even gain your freedom. All you have to do is answer one of the questions we have been asking you for days.” He stayed silent for a few moments, during which Q could hear the steps of his Oxfords echoing on the concrete floor, coming closer. “The other option… The other option is, of course, to believe them. That would be rather unfortunate for you, though, because it would mean that you have no worth to me at all. That I wasted expensive substances and expensive man-power on you for nothing. And that, as you will surely understand, would make me very angry. I would have you die in the most agonising way imaginable. After…well, after Gustavo had his fun. He likes boys, you must know.”

As if that had been a cue, Gustavo’s hands started sliding appreciatively down Q’s side. He swallowed hard but didn’t make a sound. He was a dead man. He had accepted that the moment he had opened his eyes to this room for the first time. The suffering would get worse, a lot worse, but if they didn’t think him important any more, at least – sooner or later – it would end.

“Are you sure this is the option you wish to choose?” Cézar asked, and for the first time Q could hear something like annoyance in his voice.

Q said nothing.

“Well,” Cézar said. “You will not have any reservations against me watching, then. I would like to see you break.”

Q could hear him walking back to the table in the middle of the room, and his suit rustled when he sat down in the chair facing Q. “Start,” he commanded, and Gustavo’s hands were back on Q’s body, his hot, wet breath at the side of Q’s neck as his legs were pushed apart; and Q tried to prepare himself, as much as possible-

Something sounded through the room right then, a noise that did not quite fit in, or that, at the very least, didn’t really make sense: The click of the safety catch on a gun being released.

“Tell him to stop.” The voice speaking was like ice, a promise of intense, cold violence, that could easily rival the expression Q had seen in Cézar’s eyes a few times before.

For Q, it was the most welcome voice in the whole wide world, one he hadn’t let himself believe he’d ever hear again, and he almost sobbed in unexpected relief, because this could mean only one thing: Bond had found him.

“How did you-“ Cézar was interrupted by the deafening sound of a shot and a cry of pain as Gustavo went to his knees next to Q, followed by another shot that rendered him silent.

“Too slow,” Bond said, dryly.

“Will you kill me?”

Q had to give it to Cézar: His voice still sounded somewhat calm in the presence of a pissed-off double-O who was undoubtedly holding a pistol to the back of his head and had just shot his henchman without so much as blinking.

“I had to promise my superiors not to do that. Sadly. But…since you were resisting arrest I had to hurt you.”

“I am not resisting,” César gave back.

Bond huffed. “Really? I’d see that differently.”

Something was being slammed into a surface with sudden brutality for three, four times. The surface being, probably, the table. And the something being, probably, Cézar’s face.

Then, quick steps came to where Q was shackled to the wall, and calloused hands freed him with a softness one wouldn’t think them capable of after their last few actions.

“My God, what have they done to you?” Bond said, genuine shock in his voice; and Q was turned around, finally able to look at him. Bond sucked in air through his mouth with a harsh sound, his stale-blue eyes clouded, a sky before a thunderstorm.

“Nothing they haven’t done to you a thousand times over,” Q gave back, his voice like sandpaper.

Bond inspected a small source of pain over Q’s left eyebrow that was probably a cut from when Gustavo had punched him in the face a few times too many. “I’m a professional. This is different.”

  
Q laughed, surprised by the emotion. “Have you forgotten that I’m a professional, too, 007? I kill people on the regular.”

“It’s still different,” Bond retorted, coolly. “I should kill the bastard. But M says he needs him. That was the only way I could get clearance for the mission.”

“Who are they?” Q demanded to know. His hand had involuntarily taken hold of the lapel of Bond’s suit jacket, and his body was crowding closer to the familiar scent of aftershave and the knowledge that he was safe, impossibly so.

Bond shook his head. “Later. I’m getting you out first. And him.” He threw Cézar’s motionless body on the table a snide look. “Reinforcement is on its way. They have a nice little stock of heroin down here. Should be more than enough for legal proceedings.”

He raised Q’s chin with his fingers, caressing his cheek in a place where the touch didn’t hurt, for once. “Most importantly, though, you’re safe.” The storm was draining from Bond’s eyes, leaving only worry and gentleness for the moment.

“Most importantly?” Q asked, a flutter of wings in his marred chest.

“Yes,” Bond said. “Yes.”

And Q let himself be pulled in against Bond, let him press a kiss into his hair; and for a little while the pain made space for warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> The Velvet Underground song being discussed is, of course, "Heroin". It contains, among others, the lyric: "And I feel just like Jesus' son." Apparently Cézar really likes his late-60s drug music references...


End file.
